Dakota Fanning co-stars in “The Secret Life of Bees,” which opens Friday in San Antonio. But another, more notorious movie she made a couple years ago apparently won’t make it here at all.

That would be “Hounddog,” which earned a fair amount of notoriety when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 for a rape scene involving Fanning, then 12.

Then … crickets.

The film languished for more than a year and a half, until it finally received a limited release in mid-September. That didn’t go so well — Roger Ebert called “Hounddog” a cliched, overheated Southern melodrama, although he praised Fanning’s performance as a troubled, Elvis-obsessed girl who had been raped by an older teen. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, who described the rape scene as “barely glimpsed,” said in a review of the recent release, “This ain’t the old Dakota Fanning rape movie they showed at Sundance nearly two years ago to a rain of critical revulsion. This is the re-edited Dakota Fanning rape movie that re-emerges as an even riper piece of cheese.”

(Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Dakota Fanning (with co-star Jennifer Hudson) has received praise for her work in ‘The Secret Life of Bees,’ which does open in S.A. tomorrow.

Guess that explains why “Hounddog,” which had been scheduled for a wider release in October, was pulled. Screenings for critics were canceled, said Express-News Film Critic Larry Ratliff, who never got a chance to see it. Curious S.A. fans are in the same boat. It probably won’t resurface until it comes out on DVD, tentatively set for February.

Fanning, however, seems none the worse for wear. Now 14, she has continued her rise in “Bees,” the film version of a popular novel by Sue Monk KIdd set in rural South Carolina in 1964. In his review, Ebert wrote, “Dakota Fanning comes of age in this film, and in the somewhat similar but less successful ‘Hounddog.’ She’s not a kid anymore. She has always been a good actress, and she is only growing deeper and better. I expect her to make the transition from child to woman with the same composure and wisdom that Jodie Foster demonstrated.”